The support flood on Monday - crunching the numbers

Ok, lets think about this:

Say you have 30 people answering the phone to help with password resets.
Each person can help one person every five minutes.
Each person is at work for 8 hours and has 6.5 of them productive.

30ppl X 12 calls/hour X 6.5 hours = 2340 people helped a day.

Now I'm making numbers up here. Personally I doubt that LL has the capacity to handle that may incoming calls at once. One call per five minutes, that's suspect. 6.5 hours of productive work in a work day, hell thats only a meal break and two coffee breaks, most places would love to get six and a half hours of real work out of the average employeee in North America.

2340 people? Do you think they will have that many callers, more, less? I'm betting more personally.

Like I'm said I'm making these numbers up, what do you think the real numbers are?

Let's go on...

How many people will call?
Let's make a quick estimate: usually at this time/day there are at least 14000 people online. Now there are slightly more than half of that.

If we use that as an estimate, half of the accounts are having problems with their passwords.

Every given day at least five times more accounts than the average "online now" accounts log in. That is 70.000 accounts.

Half of them, 35.000 will need to call in the time they spend to give support to no more than 2340...

I think the most concurrent users I have ever seen is just over 10,000 and we just broke that last weekend or the week before. I would search for the forum post but the forums are too slow right now to do that.

Maybe they're hoping people will more people will remember their security code by Monday.

Again...

The first call will get serviced, while the queue begins building up...

How many people will add to the queue in the five minute it takes to answer the lucky first one?

That's 35.000 calls / number of 5 min slots in an 8 hour working day, assuming the best case in which they are distributed evenly...

So 35.000 / ((8*60) / 5) = 364.6 <- seems hard, right? time to whip out the trusty calc

At the end of they day, they will have answered only the first 2340 people, but how long they will have waited on line?

The speed at which call que builds up is 73 calls per minute... How much will the last call have to wait?
The first in serviced immediately, but the 2340th will have called (/me whips out calc again) 32 mins after customer service opened, having waited two mins less than ... 7 and half hours on the phone!

at standard international rates, thit means that european non uk residents will have to sell their car, just to talk with someone...

And guess what happens if the line drops... O_O

As another non american i have to agree here, Linden can go to hell as soon as i work out how to cancel the billing. I dont think i'l ever use my card on the net again.

Be sure to factor in how many people simply walk away without even making a phone call, maybe canceling the card they used for their SL accounts.

"Talk to the hand" indeed.

As a general tech support rep for a niche software company, I humble offer my skills to help with is issue...

if you feel like flying me down there, housing me, training me in two days, paying a good per diem, etc, etc. I need a new job and I need out of Dallas

After my security question got messed up, I was able to get my new password by reading the forums. I'm not making this up.

If not for the forums, I would have been another caller on Monday.

Me too.

coco

I had one account logged in to the forums, my other 2 are screwed until I can get my old email domain back up . I remember the answers, can't get to the questions .

I've read almost every single post in the forums and have no clues how to get my password back/reset. I've tried 10 different variations of my security question answer to no avail. Please explain how you got your password back from the forum!

After reading Robins most recent post, i called my bank, thinking id just get the times i could call tomorrow, low and behold after being in a que less than 2 minutes i got a REAL person to help me, even at this time of night. I have my Debit card on file with LL, the bank is putting a watch on the card, they are emailing me every purchase transaction made on it, and i have 48 hours to report theft, and all the money from that theft will be returned to my account. I couldnt have been more pleased. They have a customer for life on that one, and thats about the best compliment i can pass on to a customer service dept.
I do have to laff, after 10 tries to get in tonite, i kept getting auto emails from customer service, telling me to contact live help in the game, hahahha like we could get in to do that, then they have the nerve to send me a customer service evaluation email...oh man that sure was the wrong time to do that...i am laffing now, but then i was sure pissed off, and told them just what i thought of their customer service...el stinko grande

yea id like to know how to get my pword back from the froms too so share the love n tell